Becky Hammon is the first WNBA player to go on to become an NBA assistant coach. / Soobum Im, USA TODAY Sports

by Nancy Armour, USA TODAY Sports

by Nancy Armour, USA TODAY Sports

SAN ANTONIO - Even after all these years, Becky Hammon still hears the voice in her ear.

The assistant coach at Colorado State was constantly on Hammon, telling her she was going to be the school's first All-American. How she was going to do this. How she was going to do that.

"I'm a little girl from South Dakota, and she starts talking all this crazy stuff," the NBA's first full-time female assistant coach said Monday during an exclusive interview with USA TODAY Sports. "But when she started speaking all that, she started planting seeds. 'Yeah, maybe. Maybe I could do that if I worked really hard.'

"You have those people speaking really good things in your life and it grows and produces fruit later on," Hammon said. "But somebody had to initially plant those good seeds."

Being a trailblazer was not part of Hammon's master plan, and the idea that the barrier she is shattering as an assistant with the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs could have ramifications far beyond sports is still a bit surreal.

She loves basketball, has ever since she started playing when she was 4 or 5 - "I grew up in the woods; we were either on three-wheelers or four-wheelers or we were playing basketball," she said - and her initial foray into the men's game was simply in hopes of helping her become a better player.

The point guard for the San Antonio Stars missed most of the 2013 season after blowing out her knee last July, and her rehab forced her to stay in the United States last fall and winter rather than play overseas like most WNBA players do in the offseason. Hammon was already considering her options for when her post-playing days, and she asked Stars coach Dan Hughes if he thought the Spurs would let her observe them.

Most of the Spurs already knew - and respected - Hammon. She and Tony Parker have been friends for years, and the 16-year WNBA veteran is known for having a savant-like basketball IQ. Coach Gregg Popovich had become a fan, too, impressed not only with Hammon's game, but all her experiences outside basketball.

Popovich may have a rep for being prickly, but he's also one of the smartest and most well-rounded coaches in the NBA, well versed in everything from politics to pinot noirs. When he and Hammon found themselves on the same flight home from the London Olympics, they spent the entire time talking - about everything but basketball.

"From the time that he got off that trip, he really had an intrigue about Becky not only as a coach but just as a person," Spurs general manager R.C. Buford said. "If you've spent time studying or watching Pop, it's not about basketball, it's about people."

'KNOWS WHAT TO SAY'

When Hughes floated the idea late last summer of Hammon watching practices, Popovich not only agreed, he invited her to join his staff for film sessions and help out with drills. Soon, Hammon was in the midst of a full-fledged coaching internship.

"You never knew how it's going to work out, but, boy, I had good feelings," said Hughes, who has coached Hammon for all eight years she's been in San Antonio. "I knew how they felt about Beck, and I knew how Beck would come across with them. They'd seen she was a good player, but they would see that communication she's learned, that presence."

Just as Hughes expected, Hammon proved to be an easy fit with the Spurs. But even when friends raised the prospect of her internship turning into a permanent job, Hammon couldn't quite see it.

There have been a handful of female assistants in Division I men's college basketball, and then-WNBA assistant Lisa Boyer worked as a volunteer assistant with the Cleveland Cavaliers for a season. But no NBA team - no team in any of the major U.S. men's professional leagues, for that matter - have had a full-time female assistant, on par with her male counterparts.

"I remember saying, 'It just seems so impossible to happen. Just because it never has,'" Hammon said.

Pitino actively sought out Bernadette Mattox when he took over at Kentucky, wanting a woman on his coaching staff as he rebuilt the culture in the wake of crippling NCAA violations. Mattox was an integral part of the program in her four years at Kentucky, Pitino said, with the players respecting and responding to her.

To say a woman can't coach men is as silly as dismissing someone who didn't play the game in college or in the pros, Pitino said.

"It really has nothing to do with playing ability," Pitino said. "It has to with understanding the game of basketball."

And there is no question Hammon understands the game â?? better than most. Her teammates already consider her like another coach; before the fourth quarter of Sunday's must-win game against the Los Angeles Sparks, it was Hammon delivering instructions to her teammates while Hughes and his assistants game-planned a few feet away.

But in addition to that font of knowledge, Hammon has a knack for communicating that corporate consultants would crave. Rookies, veterans, men, women â?? Hammon knows just how to get her point across. She has no qualms speaking up, either, be it with her current team or her future one.

"She knows what to say, when to say it, how to say it," Stars rookie Kayla McBride said. "Since day one, she's always been in my ear. But in a good way. She knows I'm a rookie and she knows how to talk to me compared to (a veteran)."

FINISHING WITH STARS

Hammon also is as tough as they come.

Despite her success and longevity, Hammon has often been overlooked. She went undrafted after being a three-time All-American at Colorado State. She was repeatedly ignored by the U.S. team, not even making the short list of potential players before the Beijing Olympics.

The snub led Hammon to play for Russia, where she has played in the offseason several times. It was an agonizing decision for someone who had dreamed of representing the U.S. since she was a little girl, made even more difficult by the public scorn it drew. She was labeled a traitor â?? never mind that she only opted to play for Russia because the U.S. didn't want her.

Though the experience left her emotionally battered, it also steeled her for whatever criticism, jokes or snide remarks will come her way in coming months.

"I know who I am," she said. "When you get comfortable with yourself like that and you know you're doing the right thing, you can take a lot of crap."

Hammon left the Spurs just as the NBA playoffs began. She knew she wanted to play at least one more season, and she wanted to devote her full attention to the Stars. But she told Popovich she would keep in touch.

When she decided in July that this would be her last season, the Spurs didn't hesitate. San Antonio has a history of grooming its own talent, making room on staff for Jacque Vaughn, now coach of the Orlando Magic, after his playing career ended, and Buford said the Spurs see Hammon in much the same way.

That Hammon was a woman, or that the Spurs would be making history by hiring her, never even entered the discussion. Popovich's only concern was that Hammon was qualified, and she'd more than proven that during her internship.

"We weren't doing this to lead the way. It's for others to judge the monumental-ness of it. But that's not the reason we did it," Buford said. "It's that she's the right person. She's a good person. Why would we let her go start her involvement somewhere else when she can bring things to us?"

Though opportunities for women in sports have increased exponentially since the passage of Title IX, it wasn't all that long ago that women were discouraged from playing or being athletic.

Hammon's parents, Bev and Marty, were unflinchingly supportive and "enabling," Hammon said, taking their three kids camping or fishing almost every weekend. Marty Hammon coached his youngest daughter growing up, and Hammon can't begin to count the number of hours she spent playing basketball with or against her older brother, Matt.

But at 37, Hammon also remembers the things that were off-limits to her and every other girl her generation. She may have been able to pin state champions when she wrestled her brother and his friends in the Hammon basement, but there was never a thought of her wrestling competitively.

"I wasn't allowed, because I was a girl," she said. "And back then, you didn't break those rules."

The Spurs, however, have never cared much about anybody else's rules. They paired Tim Duncan and David Robinson when no one considered playing two big men together. They built a United Nations-like roster when other teams weren't quite sold on international players.

And now they have hired the first female assistant.

"I think yeah," Hammon said when asked if another team could have done it. "But the Spurs are the ones who actually pulled the trigger. Who said, 'We like this fit, we can see how this would work.' It's no coincidence that they're always one step ahead. That is not coincidental. That did not just happen."

Hammon's exact responsibilities with the Spurs are still to be determined. (The same goes for Ettore Messina, a two-time Euroleague coach of the year who also joined the San Antonio staff this summer.) The Stars are Hammon's first priority as long as they're playing - she got teary when she talked about all of the friends and family who are coming for Friday's regular-season home finale - but she'll turn her focus to the Spurs as soon as the Stars are done.

Despite all the talk about the "men's game" and the "women's game," Xs and Os are basketball's universal language. Hammon is also familiar with the Spurs systems. The biggest challenge, she said, will be getting up to speed on personnel throughout the league.

But it's one she'll master, Hughes said.

"What they do makes sense to her. And what she does will make sense to them," Hughes said. "That's going to be a fairly watched coach. There's no question. I've just been around that woman enough to know it's going to work. It's going to work."

Though Hammon hopes the day will come when she's just identified as an assistant, she also knows the impact she'll have - on women of all ages. After all, no one knows better the power of having your eyes opened to possibility.

"Hope and encouragement, especially hope, is probably one of the greatest things you can give another person," she said. "I mean, what a gift to allow that person to be able to dream, to be able to say, why not me? Why couldn't I be the first?"